Month: July 2018

Enlarge / A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper awaits maintenance December 8, 2016, at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. Training materials for the Reaper Aircraft Maintenance Unit were stolen by a hacker exploiting a Netgear router. (credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Christian Clausen)

In May, a hacker perusing vulnerable systems with the Shodan search engine found a Netgear router with a known vulnerability—and came away with the contents of a US Air Force captain's computer. The purloined files from the captain—the officer in charge (OIC) of the 432d Aircraft Maintenance Squadron's MQ-9 Reaper Aircraft Maintenance Unit (AMU)at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada—included export-controlled information regarding Reaper drone maintenance.

The hacker took the documents to a Dark Web marketplace, where he planned on selling them for a few hundred dollars. And it's there that analysts from Recorded Future, an information security threat intelligence company, discovered them.

US Air Force/Recorded Future

Corporate users should now be unafraid to roll out the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, aka Version 1803, to their fleets, according to Microsoft.

Over the course of Windows 10's life, the precise terminology that Microsoft uses to denote this has changed. Originally, there was a split between the "Current Build"—the latest stable update with the latest monthly patch—and the "Current Build for Business." This latter label was used to denote the version that Microsoft felt was sufficiently tested and stabilized as to be suitable to roll out to conservative corporate fleets. While the Current Build would be updated to each new major update as soon as it was released, the Current Build for Business typically lagged by a few months.

The terminology has now changed a bit; what was once "Current Build" is now "Semi-Annual Channel (targeted)," and "Current Build for Business" is now "Semi-Annual Channel." But the effect is the same: as of yesterday's patch, which brings Windows 10's build number up to 17134.165, Version 1803 is now blessed with the Semi-Annual Channel label.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

For around four years now, the water supply to the city of Flint, Michigan, has been contaminated with lead. Now, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has promised to help. Replying to a request on Twitter, Musk pledged to fund remediation work to houses with contaminated water supplies.

Please consider this a commitment that I will fund fixing the water in any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels. No kidding.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2018

For some time now, people on Twitter and elsewhere have been calling on Musk to turn his attention to this domestic scandal; those calls having escalated in response to his high-profile interest in the rescue of 12 children and their soccer coach from a cave network in Thailand.

As is usually the case with plans that are barely an hour old, the details are thin as of now. But Musk—tweeting from China—told people in Flint to reply to his tweet with test results showing contamination above the recommended limits, at which point he would arrange having a water filter fitted for them. (We should note that it's actually the EPA, not the FDA, that sets limits on environmental pollution exposure, and that the state of Michigan has already been supplying water filters to affected residents.)

Enlarge / Early hominins lived here, near Shangchen in China's southern Loess Plateau, 2.1 million years ago. (credit: Prof. Zhaoyu Zhu)

Early hominins ventured out into the world beyond Africa even earlier than we've given them credit for, according to a new stone-tool find on the southern edge of China's Loess Plateau.

Hominins—the lineage of apes that eventually came to include humans—began making recognizeable stone tools about 3 million years ago. Before that date, we know that our early relatives inhabited a place only if we find their bones or, in rarer cases, their footprints. But stone tools offer a more durable, more abundant calling card. Pick up a stone flake or scraper—or a core of flint or chert with obvious scars from flintknapping—and you know that someone made this object. Someone was here.

And that's exactly what archaeologists led by Zhaoyu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found in a 2.1-million-year-old layer of ancient wind-blown sediment in China's southern Loess Plateau: a collection of stone cores, flakes, scrapers, borers, and points, as well as a couple of damaged hammerstones. The tools' style strongly resembles stone tools found at sites of about the same age in Africa, made by early human relatives like Homo erectus.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Palto)

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to overhaul its public comments system to deter fraud and abuse, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a letter to lawmakers last week.

The FCC may institute a CAPTCHA system as part of a redesign that will "institute appropriate safeguards against abusive conduct," Pai told Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.).

"[T]he FCC is planning to rebuild and re-engineer ECFS [Electronic Comment Filing System] and has submitted a request to reprogram the funds necessary to undertake this project," Pai wrote. "This reprogramming request is pending before the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and we hope they will enable us to make important improvements by approving it soon."

Enlarge / Tesla's new Model 3 car on display is seen on Friday, January 26, 2018, at the Tesla store in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images)

Martin Tripp, the ex-Tesla technician who has been sued by his former employer, has now filed a formal whistleblower tip to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tripp's lawyer, Stuart Meissner, told Ars that his client is reiterating claims that the company has been allegedly dishonest with the public and with investors in statements regarding Model 3 production.

Previously, Tripp told Ars that he wanted to reveal internal waste and safety flaws in Tesla batteries that he claimed he observed while working at the company’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. The tip, known as a "TCR," was filed late last Friday.